This publication has been designed to assist local authorities, together with their partner agencies, in developing and implementing a systematic approach to the self-evaluation of their education functions. The publication provides practical assistance and advice on the process of self-evaluation at both strategic and operational levels. It focuses on the role of self-evaluation in developing a council’s capacity to drive continuous improvement and, most importantly, to secure and demonstrate measurable improvement in the quality of learners’ educational experience. The clear focus is on impact and outcomes.
The self-evaluation support materials are also provided as an online resource. This will assist authorities in amending or augmenting the materials to suit local needs, priorities and circumstances. Authorities’ approaches to self-evaluation will build on existing good practice.
The publication also includes the performance and quality indicators, measures and themes which will provide the basis for external inspection of the education functions of councils in this second cycle of statutory inspections. Each authority will be able, through its own self-evaluation arrangements, to gather management information and evidence that enable it to judge the effectiveness of its performance against six high-level questions, which will also form the basis for inspections of the education functions of councils by HMIE. These are:
Each of these high-level questions can be answered by evaluating the quality of education across ten Key Areas. At the centre of this framework are key performance outcomes and the impact provision is having on service users, the community and staff. Inputs, such as leadership and management, support the effectiveness of education processes and together help us to arrive at an overall evaluation of the council’s capacity for improvement. The framework is summarised in figure one on the next page.
This guide aims to provide support for authorities in carrying out the process of self-evaluation through which they can:
The use of performance and quality indicators, for both self-evaluation and external inspection, promotes consistency. Although these two processes may differ in terms of purpose and audience, their language and basis should be the same, enabling open and honest dialogue and consistency across different evaluations.
Figure 1 – The overarching QMIE2 framework